After Ghost Ship Fire, Oakland DIY Grapples With a Broken System

Aerial photos of the Oakland warehouse venue where dozens perished in a fire over the weekend resemble a rib cage parted and relieved of its heart. On Friday evening, however, the second-story of the building known as Ghost Ship pulsed with life: Johnny Igaz, a DJ known as Nackt, spun records to a swelling crowd of at least 60, who anticipated a late night of industrial-techno and minimal electronic music by Obsidian Blade and Golden Donna.

Performer Russell Butler was outside greeting arrivals when he turned around to see friends emerging from black plumes of smoke that had suddenly saturated the labyrinthine structure. “I thought of Johnny in the DJ booth at the far end of the building,” Butler said (Igaz is still unaccounted for). “And when people stopped coming out the door—it was just wrong.”

Local musician Mara Barenbaum, who lives nearby, heard about the fire within minutes and rushed to the Fruitvale district warehouse shortly after 11 p.m. Until nearly dawn, she consoled friends across the street as firefighters struggled to quell the blaze. Barenbaum recalled envisioning ladders extended and friends clambering out the windows, but it didn’t happen.

Ever since, officials have been clearing debris with buckets and sifting through the remains of at least 36 people, a number that’s expected to increase. They’ve requested DNA samples of those suspected missing, for identification purposes.

Local politicians clamber for scapegoats: leaseholder, inspector, or gig organizers? One city councilperson bizarrely offered “anarchist rejection of regulation.” Droves of distraught family and friends, meanwhile, gather to mourn in Oakland bars, homes, and warehouse residences reminiscent of Ghost Ship. Their talk centers on fallen community pillars, feckless and tone-deaf officials, survival, and the undertow of displacement. “It feels like the end of individualism around here,” Barenbaum said. “There’s just this needed commitment to solidarity.”

The damage; photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Among the attendees and performers unaccounted for or confirmed dead, according to the Trans Assistance Project, are three transgender women: Feral Pines, Em Bohlka, and Cash Askew, one half of downcast synth-pop duoThem Are Us Too. Known casualties include film director Alex Ghassan, as well as Ara Jo, who ran arts spaces and zine fests with infectious aplomb. One of Friday’s scheduled performers, Chelsea Faith, an electronic musician who records as Cherushii for 100% Silk, is unaccounted for. This writer remembers well the inspired ideas of Joey Casio, who also remains missing, about the alchemy of hardware and the dancefloor’s insurrectionary potential.

The breadth and scope of the missing persons—whose varied identities and backgrounds reveal an event intent on inclusivity—incited a staggering show of tribute. The owner of local bar Eli's Mile High Club donated tips to those who’d lost housemates; it was rent time, after all. The Warriors pledged tens of thousands to victims and their families. Local house shows were cancelled, supplanted by open invitations to somber backyard bonfires. Butler recast a planned nightclub performance Saturday night as a reverie. “We can’t call it a memorial,” he said that afternoon. “We want to hold space and to hold on for our friends, especially with the music we love.”

Drained late last century by declining tax revenue and selective civic neglect, Oakland boasts a constellation of seemingly derelict warehouses, storefronts, and churches. Within many of their shabby exteriors, however, are places of creative invention and possibility. These homes and venues—known by cryptic names rarely recorded in the press—cradle scenes that slip between categories; they’re where as-yet-unnamed subcultures gestate. For non-conforming bodies harassed and abused at other clubs, they’re sanctuaries.

In some ways, Ghost Ship was typical of these unsanctioned live-work venues: a post-industrial shell repurposed by artists with the tacit approval of a property owner likely anticipating lucrative redevelopment. In other ways, it was anomalous: leaseholder Derick Almena, a collector of world-religion trinkets who has compared himself to fascists (and who was not at the event), is emerging as more underground profiteer than participant. In a Facebook post after the fire, he lamented not the death toll but the loss of “everything I worked so hard for.”

Locals including Nihar Bhatt (who co-runs techno and minimal-synth series Surface Tension) and Michael Buchanan (who coordinates discrete electronic music events through Katabatik) told me that they’d already resolved not to book at Ghost Ship on account of its structural integrity. Another booker, who asked not to be identified, claimed that Almena charged him far more than comparable underground spaces: $1,000/night. After one gig last year, according to court documents, Almena allegedly threatened to “go get my gun” after a booker refused to pay more than an agreed-upon rate. (Almena didn’t return requests for comment.)

The fact that events nevertheless continued to occur at Ghost Ship, said Barenbaum, reveals the music community’s “compromises” at a time when warehouse residences and unofficial venues are vulnerable to displacement. “These events are a necessity and a right,” Barenbaum said. “But when you have these closures and this stagnation, people are forced into spaces that aren’t proper. And when they lack healthy ways to express themselves, it can be destructive.”

In 2007, Barenbaum cofounded storied underground venue Bay Area 51. It was in the expanded garage of a two-story San Francisco structure once used as a hippie bus depot. A professional electrician, she toiled and fretted over visitors’ safety. The eccentric, permissive landlord “lived on a sinking houseboat in Marin,” Barenbaum said, but he nevertheless ousted residents earlier this year to better tempt buyers.

By then, Bay Area 51 seemed starkly anachronistic against what outgoing residents consider technocrats’ antiseptic vision for San Francisco. And that narrative has migrated to Oakland, where Uber’s future headquarters sits downtown wrapped in tattered white plastic like a spurned gift. According to a recent report by the local organization Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, more than 50,000 formal eviction notices were posted between 2008 and 2015, a figure that only begins to reveal the scope of displacement in Oakland.

“With more than 2,000 [eviction notices] a year, it makes sense that people are living in these precarious scenarios,” said Erin McElroy, cofounder of the Mapping Project. “And a crackdown isn’t going to keep people out of unsafe places. It’s going to accelerate it. …The priority of the city should be securing affordable housing for residents and preventing evictions.”

City officials often decry the housing crisis, but the recent Mapping Project report includes a troubling finding: Oakland’s leading “mega-evictor,” William Rosetti, whose associated companies are responsible for over 4,000 evictions in the period studied, is a member of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s handpicked “housing cabinet.”

“When [Schaaf] was asked about it, she said that she wanted a diverse group, including landlords and tenants rights people, but the fact that the landlord she chose is behind 4,000 evictions is significant,” McElroy said. “People with that much property here have always had the power.”

What remains of Ghost Ship; photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

“The other option for a lot of us who live in warehouses here is living in the streets,” said David Montoya, a former resident of live-work venue Lobot Gallery, which was evicted after 13 years this summer. Montoya, who now lives in another warehouse, performed at Ghost Ship weeks before the fire. “It was obvious to me and my friends that the place was dangerous,” he added.

Examples of expelled havens abound. Lobot’s loss was a major one for the community; in recent years, the space reflected tenants’ identities with an emphasis on queer artists, as well as regularly accommodated benefit gigs. “We weren’t making money off the scene,” Montoya said. “We provided for people who’d fled abusive partners, trans people, brown people.”

Underground music venues and residences Ghost Town Gallery and Sugar Mountain, adjacent units in a sprawling former West Oakland creamery, also folded this summer and in 2014, respectively, following protracted landlord disputes. The latter recently reappeared on the rental market this year as an $8,500/month 3-bedroom with suggested yoga studio and wine cellar. Then 1919 Market Street, a warehouse subdivided into dozens of distinct units by crafty families and artists alike, was deemed uninhabitable by the city this summer after it fell under the control of one of local housing activists’ most scorned developers, the Negev.

“We were told it’d take two months and we could move back in, and the sad part is that people believed it,” said Beck Levy, who lived in Grandma’s House, a unit in the Market St. building once known for riotous noise-rock shows. “This was families, burners, old rock‘n’roll people, artists—and the tactics used against them were just predatory. As far as our supposed contacts at the city, it was incomprehensible."

Oakland City Councilperson Noel Gallo, who represents the predominantly Latino Fruitvale district of East Oakland containing Ghost Ship, thundered the need for more inspectors and code-enforcement when approached by reporters at the scene of the fire. But condemning more structures, New York City Loft Tenants volunteer Heather Troy countered, only further marginalizes people already forced, by need of culture or cash, to the fringes of cities such as Oakland.

New York City, Troy explained, has a program that partners tenants of “illegally inhabited” buildings with landlords to conform structures to regulatory standards while retaining their mixed-use designation for creative purposes. It’s a complicated and incrementally improved system, Troy said, but it provides needed improvements without eviction. “I definitely encourage the community and its representatives to create a pathway to bring these buildings up to code without displacing their tenants,” Troy said. “How important is this culture to your city?”

Asked to surmise the value of this scene to Oakland, Levy invoked a favorite phrase from MLK: "People need places to gather in Beloved Community."